On the Grand Trunk Road (17 page)
Read On the Grand Trunk Road Online
Authors: Steve Coll
Zia’s sudden death in the summer of 1988 drew together in a single explosion many strains of American and Pakistani suspicion. Among the Pakistani elite, everybody had his own conspiracy theory. I don’t think I have ever met a Pakistani, elite or not, who believes that Zia died accidentally. What they disagree about is who led the plot and why. When I first began to look into the case in depth in the late autumn of 1989, it became clear that any investigation would be driven as much by this tangled psychology as by material fact. But I underestimated how difficult it would be to separate one from the other.
At the beginning, the accessible, undisputed facts were intriguing but inconclusive.
At the time of his death, Zia’s power in Pakistan was under challenge as it had not been for some years. In May 1988, Zia had tossed out of office his civilian prime minister, who had been advertised as a significant figure in the transition to democracy. Zia had also cracked down on Pakistan’s minority Shia Muslim sect, and he was seen as responsible for the murder of a local Shia party leader, which angered the neighboring revolutionary Shia Muslim government of Iran. He had allowed Benazir Bhutto, the charismatic opposition leader, to return home, and she and her Pakistan People’s Party had loudly and convincingly demanded the restoration of democracy. The war in Afghanistan looked to be winding down with a promised Soviet withdrawal, which in turn promised to reduce America’s decade-long expedient tolerance of Zia’s authoritarianism and pan-Islamic ideology. Zia apparently sensed a potential danger. That summer he rarely left his heavily guarded home and office in Islamabad. He made an exception on August 17, the scheduled date of a U.S.-sponsored special demonstration trial of a battle tank the Americans wanted to sell the Pakistanis as part of the extensive program of arms sales and transfers from Washington to Islamabad. A demonstration of the tank’s features would be held in the dusty plains of south-central Punjab province, near the midsized cities of Multan and Bahawalpur.
That morning, Zia boarded in Rawalpindi a camouflaged C-130 transport plane maintained and flown by a special unit of the transport wing of the Pakistani air force. With him were several senior generals in the Pakistan military and various military officers on Zia’s personal staff. The passengers sat comfortably in what was called the WIP capsule, a tube appointed with carpeting, armchairs, and other amenities that could be inserted as needed into the hull of a C-130, a four-engine transport manufactured by Lockheed Corporation of California. The plane was a proven workhorse of the U.S. Air Force and other militaries around the world. The pilot of Zia’s C-130, which was designated Pak One because the president was aboard, was Wing Commander Mashoud Hassan, a transport flyer of distinction and experience. The copilot was a Shia Muslim officer with a similarly impressive career.
The C-130 flew that morning without incident to a military air base at Bahawalpur. Zia and his traveling party boarded helicopters and flew to the site of the tank trial, where they were greeted by the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Arnold Raphel, and Brigadier General Herbert Wassom, the chief U.S. military attaché in Islamabad, as well as by other Americans involved in the tank demonstration. This distinguished audience sat in the dusty sunlight and watched the American tank do its thing, which it reportedly did very badly that day, to the embarrassment of the Americans. Afterward, Raphel and Wassom flew back to Bahawalpur in the helicopters with Zia and his officers. They landed before lunch. Raphel went to a local Catholic convent to express condolences for the recent, unsolved murder of a resident American nun. Zia went briefly into town on political business and then joined Raphel and others for lunch at the canteen of the Bahawalpur army base. After lunch, Zia prayed. Shortly after 3:00 P.M. his party headed for the air base to fly back to Rawalpindi. A few presents, purchased for Zia in the area, including a crate of mangos, were placed aboard the C-130, uninspected. Zia invited the Americans, Raphel and Wassom, to join him for the flight home. The Americans had their own small jet available. But they agreed to join Zia. The plane they boarded had been sitting on the Bahawalpur tarmac throughout the day, guarded by mixed and relatively loose contingents of soldiers, airport security paramilitaries, and local police. Nobody had performed any unusual repairs or maintenance, though the flight crew had spent a brief time fixing a jammed cargo door.
At 3:46 P.M., Pak One rolled down the runway and lifted off in clear weather, circling toward Islamabad as it climbed. After a minute, perhaps two, a controller in the Bahawalpur tower asked the plane for its position. The C-130 was now out of sight. “Pak One, stand by,” answered the captain, Mashoud. That was the last the tower heard.
About a minute later, unable to make further contact and now alarmed, controllers in the Bahawalpur tower declared Pak One missing. General Aslam Beg, the vice chief of the army staff and one of the few senior Pakistani generals who did not fly back with Zia, went looking for the C-130 in a small jet, which was to have taken him separately to Rawalpindi after a meeting Beg said he had scheduled at another city. Witnesses on the ground reported seeing Pak One flying exceptionally low to the ground, pitching up and down as a roller-coaster car would. The witnesses said the plane made one last steep climb, then dove straight into the ground at a sixty-degree angle—accounts consistent with later analysis of the wreckage. Just after the crash, General Beg spotted the burning C-130 wreckage in an open field not far from the Bahawalpur air base, ascertained that there could be no survivors, alerted the control tower, and flew on to the capital to convene an emergency meeting of what remained of Pakistan’s government.
By nightfall, the crash site had been cordoned off by the Pakistan army. Zia’s death was confirmed and announced at about 8:00 P.M. on the state-controlled television network. Beg succeeded Zia as the top man in the army. Back in Bahawalpur, efforts to recover bodies and collect evidence at the crash site continued under the army’s direction through the night. Later there were contradictory claims about how the initial forensic evidence was handled, and how much evidence was found in the heaps of fire and metal at the crash site. What is certain is that at least some identifiable bodies or body parts were recovered, since a single autopsy was later performed on the remains of the American general, Herbert Wassom. Also certain is that no autopsies were performed on the remains of the Pak One flight crew, if any such remains were identified. In Washington, a senior team on the White House’s National Security Council decided that the Pentagon should take the lead in the U.S. response to the crash. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Justice Department’s principal criminal investigative agency, was denied permission to have its agents depart for Pakistan, even though the FBI had jurisdiction under American criminal and antiterrorist laws. Exactly why the FBI was denied permission to investigate immediately remains murky, but some in what was then the last vestiges of the Reagan administration later blamed publicly a lone American military officer on the ground in Pakistan for issuing the decisive refusal.
The first extensive investigation of the crash was conducted by a joint American and Pakistani board of inquiry led by Pakistan air commodore Abbas H. Mirza. Nine members, besides Mirza, were named to the board, six of them American air force officers and three of them Pakistani air force officers. Over a period of months, the board interviewed many witnesses and conducted what it later termed, in a summary of its classified report, “exhaustive laboratory tests regarding the aircraft structure, instruments, engines, propellers and flight controls.” These tests included flight simulator analysis produced by Lockheed, the C-130 manufacturer, and technical analysis carried out by military and nonmilitary laboratories in the United States.
In its report, the board of inquiry offered definitive, confident conclusions about a number of matters. It said the C-130’S engines and propellers had definitely been functioning at the time of impact. The plane had not disintegrated or broken up before it crashed. There was no evidence of fire before impact or any external explosive or military ordnance, such as a missile or a rocket. The board ruled out pilot error definitively, although here an American reader of the summary report would notice that its language shifted from the recognizable cadence of American military authorship to the recognizable rhythms of Pakistani English, perhaps suggesting that this was a conclusion held more firmly by the Pakistani board members than by their American colleagues.
After ruling out these other factors, the board “studied in great detail,” over a period of months, questions concerning “a control problem” within the aircraft. The board worked at length on two hypotheses. One was that the “control problems in the pitching plane could have been caused by a mechanical or a hydraulic fault in the aircraft systems”—in other words, that the crash was an accident. The other hypothesis was that the control problems were “induced by the pilots either voluntarily or involuntarily” —in other words, a suicide dive or some kind of foul play.
On the accident hypothesis, a number of potential mechanical problems with cables and other structures inside the steering system were ruled out. What did seem to intrigue the investigators were “high levels of contamination by nonorganic matter consisting of aluminum and brass particles” discovered in a key area of the steering system. The contaminants greatly exceeded the acceptable level. Tests ruled out the most likely source of such contamination, a failed pump in the system. Investigators checked all the other C-130s in the Pakistan air force to see whether the problem might be generally poor maintenance of Pakistani transport plane hydraulic systems. They found no similar contamination and no dirty filters. Records of the specific C-130 that was designated Pak One on August 17 showed that it had been inspected thirty days prior to the crash and that the appropriate filters and fluids had been changed.
The board could not, therefore, “with the available evidence,” explain the hydraulic contamination. In any event, the experts believed such contamination could cause “excessive wear” but not a total breakdown of pilot control. Such a breakdown could occur only through a combination of valve failures, perhaps influenced by contaminated hydraulic fluid. But tests ruled out such a total valve breakdown—the valves in question were located and found to be in good condition. Thus the worst thing that could have happened because of the steering contamination was “sluggish controls leading to over control but not to an accident.” Unstated, but perhaps implied if you were reading the report very closely, was that a panicky pilot might react badly to this presumed “over control” in the elevator steering and cause further difficulties. Yet there was no overt suggestion that this had happened nor any evidence to support the implication.
Lack of definitive or even probable evidence of an accident led the board to consider sabotage. The obvious means of sabotage were ruled out. Deliberate contamination of the steering system was a “very remote” possibility but largely implausible on technical grounds. Physical interference with controls in the cockpit such as a fight between the pilot and the copilot “cannot be considered seriously” because of the way the cockpit controls work. A conventional “incapacitation of the pilots,” such as shooting them or hitting them over the head, “would invariably leave obvious telltale signs,” of which there were none.
This led the board to speculate about the possible “use of ultra-sophisticated techniques” that would necessarily involve “a specialist organization well-versed with carrying out such tasks and possessing all the means and abilities for its [sic] execution.” Here again the report’s language begins to sound Pakistani. Yet it is endorsed by the entire membership. “The board feels that a chemical agent may well have been used” to cause the “insidious incapacitation of the flight deck crew” with such simple gases as odorless, colorless carbon monoxide, or with other, “much more efficient [agents that] may well exist.” The gas might have been dispersed inside the C-130 by “low intensity explosives” used to fire “pressurized bottles containing poisonous gases.” There were unusual quantities of chemicals in the wreckage, including some that are sometimes associated with explosives, but these chemicals could also be traced to other, benign sources, such as fire-fighting agents. So the gas theory was possible, but you would have to be at the least sympathetic to paranoid thinking to regard it as something other than a descent into the Pakistani hall of mental mirrors. Proper autopsies on the flight deck crew would have cleared up the question. But “unfortunately,” the board lamented, no such autopsies were carried out.
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